. Land Tenures: Permanent Settlement and Ryotwari Settlement The Regulating Act of imposed on the court of Directors the legal obligation of informing all revenue transactions of the Company servants to the British Treasury. The Governor and Council consisting of the Commander-in-Chief and two counsellors sat as a Board of Revenue which discussed revenue matters. The Pitt India Act of separated the civil and military establishments in India.
Governor-General Cornwallis, himself a big landlord, wanted to create landlords after the British model in India. Cornwallis came to a settlement with the revenue farmers. This resulted in the creation of a new type of middlemen, called zamindars, reducing the cultivators to the position of mere tenants. This settlement that Cornwallis Cornwallis XI History - Lesson - - Effects of British Rule By the Court of Directors had decided to introduce the ryotwari system.
This was a system formulated by Governor Thomas Munro. Under this system the ryot, an Anglicization by the British in India of the Arabic word ra ' ī yah, meaning a peasant or cultivator, was the proprietor and tax payer of the land. The government dealt with him directly without the intervention of any middlemen. The peasant was entitled to possession of land so long as he paid the land revenue.
Apart from eviction, default could result in attachment of livestock, household property and personal belongings. The government assessed the revenue of each cultivated field. The revenue assessment was reviewed once in thirty years, taking into account the changes in grain prices, marketing opportunities, irrigation facilities and the like. The ryotwari system introduced the concept of made with the zamindars of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in , in pursuance of the instruction from the Directors, is called the Permanent Settlement.
‘Settlement’ refers to the assessment and fixing of the quantum of land revenue to be paid by each zamindar to the government. For Bengal, Bihar and Orissa(Odisha), this was fixed permanently. Thus the zamindars who were originally tax collectors acquired hereditary rights over the land assigned by the government. The zamindars pocketed